Democrats’ Texas template

By George Will

HOUSTON – Nationally, the Democratic Party, which gave indispensable assistance (“Basket of deplorables”!) to the election of President Trump, seems intent (“Impeach!”; “Abolish ICE!”; “Free stuff!”, “I am Spartacus!”) on a repeat performance. Here, however, in Texas’ 7th Congressional District, in what might turn out to be the year’s most instructive House race, Democrats seem serious about winning, and if they do with Lizzie Fletcher, they will have a template for 2020 nationally.

One of her handouts inexplicably describes her as a “fierce advocate,” as though Americans are experiencing a fierceness deficit and pine for a ferocity infusion. Actually, she speaks with the measured precision of an attorney who has worked at a major law firm (Vinson & Elkins) and who is fluent in the business-school patois (“The delta last time was …”) of her corporate clients.

The ginger group Our Revolution, which is a residue of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, supported a candidate to her left in the seven-candidate primary, perhaps because Fletcher would not genuflect at the requisite altars: She has endorsed neither a single-payer health-care system nor Medicare for all nor putting lipstick on socialism, least of all a ban – this is Texas, for Pete’s sake – on offshore drilling.

In New York and then in Massachusetts, two 10-term House incumbents, both men, have been defeated in primaries by women running to the incumbents’ left in safe Demo-cratic districts. Here, in a district held by Republicans for the past half-century, a woman is within the margin of error of the Republican incumbent in some polls.

A fifth-generation Houstonian, Fletcher is striving to become just the fourth person to represent the current iteration of the 7th District, which she describes as “leaning purple but still light pink.” It was reconfigured in 1966, when it was won by 42-year-old George H.W. Bush, who still lives in it.

After Bush’s two terms, it was held for 15 terms by Bill Archer, who rose to the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee. His successor, John Culberson, 62, wants to “let Texans run Texas” but is not a conscientious objector to non-Texas money he can send home from his perch on the Appropriations Committee. His conservatism had a Trumpian tang six years before Trump came down his tower’s escalator: In 2009, Culberson co-sponsored a “birther” bill that would have required presidential candidates to prove they are natural-born citizens. A legislative lifer, Culberson won the first of seven two-year terms in the state House in 1986 at 30. He won his 2016 congressional re-election with 56 percent of the vote.

If the best kind of generals are lucky ones, Fletcher, 43, is that kind of candidate_ The tight Senate race between incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who has visited all 254 Texas counties, is apt to energize Democratic turnout statewide. Culberson perhaps did nothing untoward when he sold a biotech stock – the one concerning which Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., has been indicted on a charge of insider trading – 10 days before the shares lost 99 percent of their value, but the optics are not optimal. And while their city still was prostrate from Hurricane Harvey, Houstonians heard the president’s stupefying statement that the Coast Guard had had to save 16,000 people because they “went out in their boats to watch the hurricane.”

It has been a while since Texas was, in Gene Autry’s lyric, “Where the longhorn cattle feed/On the lowly gypsum weed.” It is the 15th-most urban state (84.7 percent), with the nation’s fourth-, seventh-, ninth-, 11th- and 15th-most populous cities (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth). Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with Trump in nearly all, which is one reason Trump carried 21 states by larger margins than his 9 percentage-point victory in Texas.

A Fletcher victory might be an early tremor of a political earthquake. In presidential politics, Democrats have three large, safe states – California, New York and Illinois – with a combined 104 electoral votes, 38.5 percent of 270. Texas, the Republicans’ only such state, today has 38 electoral votes and after the 2020 census will have at least two more. If it turns purple, every year divisible by four will be, for Republicans, a year of living dangerously.

Nationally, Fletcher’s party seems determined to emulate former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s description of the Palestinian Arabs: They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Here, the party seems serious about winning.